Our interests require that Egypt should remain what it is, an integral part of the Turkish empire. We do not want it or wish it for ourselves, any more than any rational man with an estate in the North of England and a residence in the South would have wished to possess the inns on the North Road.

Letter to Lord Cowley (25 November 1859), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 542.